Lady Anna by Anthony Trollope
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- Jayanti Chakraborty
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Lady Anna by Anthony Trollope
I liked the book, but did not feel the kind of undiluted love for i feel his other works. The writing is true Trollope – clean, clear and simple moving the tale forward naturally. There is also quintessential egalitarian Trollope rooting for equality of merit instead of equality of birth. There are some wonderful characters that I would have want to see little more off – like Aunt Julia, the aunt to young Earl Lovel and the Solicitor General. However this is where I feel Trollope faltered in his usual brilliance – he set up the character of Aunt Julia as if she was to play a key part and seemed to be a wise and kind matriarch, but she has no presence after the initial chapters! The way the end played out, especially about the settlement of money, made me wonder why did we need the much anticipated court case to begin with. Speaking of the Court case, this again was set up to be a central event in the story, but was more of one of the many episodes of the life and times of the Lovels. I could not really warm up to any of the characters, including the titular Lady Anna, who does show spirit in the end but through book wails and goes “Mamma” at everything. The young Earl was nice and beautiful and that was all to him. Daniel Thwaite, though, I liked more and could understand his self respect and self belief and strength. I also liked the character of Countess Lovel – she is a strong and perhaps a bit obstinate woman who took on the world on her own till she proved her point and I liked the way the Trollope displayed the escalated war between her and Lady Anna and though the Countess, was not always right, I felt more for her than for any other character in the novel. Furthermore, there is too much repetition in the plot – the readers are told atleast 3 times during the novel that had people behaved more gently with Lady Anna, they would have won their point. Several times we go over and over the unfortunate history of Countess Lovel and there is about pages in the middle, where we are stuck in limbo as there is no movement in the narrative. The novel is verbose without telling us anything new or pertinent – the same point is gone over again and again and again!
I liked it, but I cannot help but feel that this is not the best of Trollope